Table of Contents

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Survey of Holt Adoptees and Their Families, 2005 (ICPSR 4637)

Principal Investigator(s):Sacerdote, Bruce, Dartmouth College, and National Bureau of Economic Research

Summary:

This study, conducted January 2004 to June 2006, was
undertaken to assess the health status, educational attainment, and
income of adult Korean-American adoptees and their adoptive families.
The study focused on families who adopted a Korean-American child
through Holt International Children's Services from 1970 to 1980. The
principal investigator hoped to identify the effects of large-scale
changes in family environment on children's outcomes using data on
adults who were adopted in infancy. Korean-American adoptees placed
th... (more info)

This study, conducted January 2004 to June 2006, was
undertaken to assess the health status, educational attainment, and
income of adult Korean-American adoptees and their adoptive families.
The study focused on families who adopted a Korean-American child
through Holt International Children's Services from 1970 to 1980. The
principal investigator hoped to identify the effects of large-scale
changes in family environment on children's outcomes using data on
adults who were adopted in infancy. Korean-American adoptees placed
through Holt International Children's Services had been quasi-randomly
assigned to these families in infancy using a queuing (first-come,
first-served) policy. One adoptive parent from each family was
surveyed, as well as a small subset of adult adoptees, and each case
represented an adopted or non-adopted child in the family. Adoptive
parents were asked to give their age, sex, marital status, occupation,
education level, household income, height, weight, tobacco and alcohol
usage, and the number of children they had. Adoptive parents also
gave information on their adopted and non-adopted children's age, sex,
marital status, education level, income, weight, height, undergraduate
institution, number of children, and whether their children smoked,
drank alcohol, or had asthma. For adopted children, parents gave the
arrival age of the child and whether the child was adopted through
Holt International. Adoptive parents also indicated whether they were
aware of and had used services such as workshops and referral services
offered by Holt. Since the survey relied on parent reports of their
adult children's outcomes, surveys were also sent to a small subset of
adoptees. Their surveys included the same questions asked of their
adoptive parents, as well as the adoptee's value of assets, religion,
and frequency of religious attendance. The study also contained
information on adoptees' birth parents obtained from Holt
International's administrative records and constructed variables that
analyzed household composition, population characteristics, and the
education and health status of the adoptive family.

Access Notes

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Study Description

Citation

Sacerdote, Bruce. Survey of Holt Adoptees and Their Families, 2005. ICPSR04637-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2007-03-26. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR04637.v1

Universe:
The adoptive families of Korean-American children who were
placed as infants by Holt International Children's Services from 1970
to 1980.

Data Types:
survey data,
administrative records data

Data Collection Notes:

(1) The original data file was received by ICPSR in
Stata format and was converted to SPSS format using the GET STATA
command. For this reason, variable names were shortened to a length of
eight characters. (2) Value labels for unknown codes were added in
several variables. (3) To protect respondent confidentiality, employer
names were removed from values in the variable OCCCURRE. (4) Values
relating to the birth years of child respondents in variable YEARBIRT
were transferred to variable CHILDBYE, per instructions from the
principal investigator. (5) Variables GENDER through IND_TR_H contain
survey responses from child respondents. (6) The formats of several
variables were adjusted to fit the width of the values present in
them. (7) Variables MOTHERSY, BIRTHM_A, and BIRTHM_B were converted
from character to numeric. (8) According to the principal
investigator, the variable WEIGHTER was the inverse of the estimated
probability of response from a probit of response on parental
characteristics. (9) Because of the anonymity of the mail-in surveys,
31 of the child respondents were unable to be linked with their
original families. For this reason, 31 records were missing data on
the child's adoptive parents and likely contain duplicate information
about that child in another record. (10) According to the principal
investigator, the asterisks found in the variable labels of
constructed variables denote multiplication. (11) The CASEID variable
was created for use with online analysis.

Methodology

Sample:
A mail-in survey was sent to a random sample of families
who had adopted a child through Holt International's Korea program
from 1970 to 1980.

Mode of Data Collection:
mail questionnaire

Response Rates:
There was an overall response rate of 27 percent.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: